Panel gears up for defense bill

In what’s become an annual rite of spring, the House Armed Services Committee is preparing to set the parameters for defense spending and lay out the new priorities for a downsized military.

Assembling the defense authorization bill is a complicated process often full of surprises as members offer amendments that can be quite controversial. Last year, for instance, provisions on detaining suspected terrorists drew a veto threat from President Barack Obama and threatened to derail the whole effort.

Story Continued Below

“We are in the process of marking up the bill now — and, frankly, we have some challenges,” Rep. Buck McKeon, chairman of the committee, told an audience of young conservatives last week at a meeting of the Alexander Hamilton Society.

The California Republican has been working with committee members to draft an authorization package that diverges in many ways from the budget offered by the president. And as the committee gears up to consider the package next Wednesday, here are five key issues to watch:

The bottom line

Committee members will be haggling over billions of dollars, and the outcome could decide the fate of major weapons programs and initiatives.

The bill being considered would set the base defense budget at about $554 billion, roughly $4 billion above the president’s request and $8 billion above the caps set by the Budget Control Act, which both parties agreed to last year as a way to reduce the deficit.

It all comes down to a debate on weapons versus entitlements: The spending levels in McKeon’s proposal line up with the budget passed by House Republicans. That plan, crafted by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), would largely spare the Pentagon from the budget ax, even as it slashes funding for Medicare and other social programs.

Still, the push to bolster defense spending could be undone in an instant if a compromise is not reached to stave off the hundreds of billions of dollars in automatic cuts to military spending set to take effect at the start of next year.

Health care benefits

The president’s budget plan would raise fees for TRICARE, which provides health care benefits for many servicemembers and veterans. The fee hikes have proved extremely unpopular, with veterans groups lobbying against them on Capitol Hill. And Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has seized on the issue on the campaign trail.

The budget plan to be considered in committee next week would do away with the hikes. And in a preview of the debate to come, Rep. Susan Davis (D-Calif.) has made clear she’s “interested in how the committee will pay for the cost of such a proposal and the impact to the defense health budget.”